Office 2007 Trial version crashes OS

[FormerRacer]

Office 2007 corrupted my XP-Pro when I chose to only install Excel 2007,
after mandatory restart. This is not the first time an MS update has cracked
up my OS. It's extremely disturbing and disruptive. If I did not have a
complete mirror of my primary drive including OS created every night, I'd be
in deep dog poo. I would have thought this problem would be eliminated by
now, unless it's just a ploy to force me to upgrade to Vista.

 

[Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]]

Sounds like user error to me since countless hundreds of thousands have managed to install Excel or any other standalone program from Office.

Why not tell us what and how you did the install instead of ranting?? Perhaps someone can point out where you erred in your choices.


--
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]

Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
reading.

After furious head scratching, FormerRacer asked:

| Office 2007 corrupted my XP-Pro when I chose to only install Excel
| 2007, after mandatory restart. This is not the first time an MS
| update has cracked up my OS. It's extremely disturbing and
| disruptive. If I did not have a complete mirror of my primary drive
| including OS created every night, I'd be in deep dog poo. I would
| have thought this problem would be eliminated by now, unless it's
| just a ploy to force me to upgrade to Vista.

 

[FormerRacer]

Alright. Here's what I did:

1) Download Office 2007 Trial
2) Do Custom Install option
3) X out all but Excel 2007 choices (folder)
4) Run install
5) Restart computer as directed (no intervening tasks)
6) At restart, computer goes into loop in middle of scroll-bar sequence,
never gets to sign-on (screen stays blank), lots of disk activity... then...
nothing... blank screen forever. I have dual screens and it's the primary
that goes blank (sign-on screen.

It's doubtful that it was hardware because there was absolutely no sign of
intermittent errors or distress either before install, or after I swapped
nightly mirror back-up drive and recovered. Crash appears to be wholly
software generated. If I had to take a wild guess, based on the blank screen
that never comes back, something in the install interfered with my Nvidia
drivers somehow.

The reason for my "rant" is that, I've built dozens of computers over the
years for my family and my business. All kinds. All levels. I can
categorically state that after many installs of a lot of software, that
statistically, every N installs of either OS updates or MS software (updates
or not), my system suffers immediate corruption, usually on restart. This is
not an everyday occurrence. But it has happened enough over 10 years that I
have taken extreme measures to avoid the pain of when it happens (thus the
mirror drive). My "rant" is more about why only MS software appears to do
this the vast majority of the time in an inconsistent and unpredictable way,
even when we, as users, are scrupulous about our procedures and methods.

If there's some magic bullet to never suffer from this problem, I'm all
ears. To blame it always on "operator error" is just a fool's arrogance. If
MS creates a Trial version of it's latest software, I don't believe many
installers would be at my level of experience nor at that of anyone in this
group. A "head in the sand" attitude of "we're never wrong... we're
Microsoft" is not helpful, nor is the expectation that an installer of widely
available software like this has to be at some uber level of OS savvy. The
rant was unfortunate. The reasons behind it are completely valid.

System specs:

Asus A8N-SLI Premium
AMD FX-60 CPU
2 gig memory
SLI-Nvidia 7800GTX's
Win XP pro
Auto updates .All drivers up to date.
No overclocking.

Sounds like user error to me since countless hundreds of thousands have managed to install Excel or any other standalone program from Office.

Why not tell us what and how you did the install instead of ranting?? Perhaps someone can point out where you erred in your choices.


--Â
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]

Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
reading.

After furious head scratching, FormerRacer asked:

| Office 2007 corrupted my XP-Pro when I chose to only install Excel
| 2007, after mandatory restart. This is not the first time an MS
| update has cracked up my OS. It's extremely disturbing and
| disruptive. If I did not have a complete mirror of my primary drive
| including OS created every night, I'd be in deep dog poo. I would
| have thought this problem would be eliminated by now, unless it's
| just a ploy to force me to upgrade to Vista.

 

[FormerRacer]

I see I'm not surprised that nobody chooses to respond. Let's try reversing
this, instead of ranting about my ranting and imperiously declaring that
"100's of thousands have blah blah..." why can't anyone look at my info and
help solve this problem? I believe I know why. It 's because this is a bug, a
bad and mysterious one, which makes no sense and is just the same ol' same
ol' for good old big brother MS who is just like Mary Poppins in every way.
Bah... humbug.

This just proves that the only "err" in my installation was to attempt it at
all. I should have learned my lesson years ago, but no, I had to have a
little faith that such destructive software installation behaviour were
actually being eliminated from the MS lexicon. Seems I was wrong.

Alright. Here's what I did:

1) Download Office 2007 Trial
2) Do Custom Install option
3) X out all but Excel 2007 choices (folder)
4) Run install
5) Restart computer as directed (no intervening tasks)
6) At restart, computer goes into loop in middle of scroll-bar sequence,
never gets to sign-on (screen stays blank), lots of disk activity... then...
nothing... blank screen forever. I have dual screens and it's the primary
that goes blank (sign-on screen.

It's doubtful that it was hardware because there was absolutely no sign of
intermittent errors or distress either before install, or after I swapped
nightly mirror back-up drive and recovered. Crash appears to be wholly
software generated. If I had to take a wild guess, based on the blank screen
that never comes back, something in the install interfered with my Nvidia
drivers somehow.

The reason for my "rant" is that, I've built dozens of computers over the
years for my family and my business. All kinds. All levels. I can
categorically state that after many installs of a lot of software, that
statistically, every N installs of either OS updates or MS software (updates
or not), my system suffers immediate corruption, usually on restart. This is
not an everyday occurrence. But it has happened enough over 10 years that I
have taken extreme measures to avoid the pain of when it happens (thus the
mirror drive). My "rant" is more about why only MS software appears to do
this the vast majority of the time in an inconsistent and unpredictable way,
even when we, as users, are scrupulous about our procedures and methods.

If there's some magic bullet to never suffer from this problem, I'm all
ears. To blame it always on "operator error" is just a fool's arrogance. If
MS creates a Trial version of it's latest software, I don't believe many
installers would be at my level of experience nor at that of anyone in this
group. A "head in the sand" attitude of "we're never wrong... we're
Microsoft" is not helpful, nor is the expectation that an installer of widely
available software like this has to be at some uber level of OS savvy. The
rant was unfortunate. The reasons behind it are completely valid.

System specs:

Asus A8N-SLI Premium
AMD FX-60 CPU
2 gig memory
SLI-Nvidia 7800GTX's
Win XP pro
Auto updates .All drivers up to date.
No overclocking.

Sounds like user error to me since countless hundreds of thousands have managed to install Excel or any other standalone program from Office.

Why not tell us what and how you did the install instead of ranting?? Perhaps someone can point out where you erred in your choices.


--Â
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]

Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
reading.

After furious head scratching, FormerRacer asked:

| Office 2007 corrupted my XP-Pro when I chose to only install Excel
| 2007, after mandatory restart. This is not the first time an MS
| update has cracked up my OS. It's extremely disturbing and
| disruptive. If I did not have a complete mirror of my primary drive
| including OS created every night, I'd be in deep dog poo. I would
| have thought this problem would be eliminated by now, unless it's
| just a ploy to force me to upgrade to Vista.

 

[Patrick Schmid [MVP]]

1) Download Office 2007 TrialIt doesn't sound like Office would be the culprit. I know of only one
actual driver that Office installs, and that is the printer driver of
OneNote, which you apparently didn't install. At the stage though where
your computer hung, you are looking at something having gone wrong with
drivers.
Office doesn't interfere with drivers, so I'd say something else
happened. Did you install anything else besides Office before you
rebooted? How long did the computer run before that reboot?

Patrick Schmid [OneNote MVP]
--------------
http://pschmid.net
***
Outlook 2007 Performance Update: http://pschmid.net/blog/2007/04/13/105
Office 2007 RTM Issues: http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/11/13/80
***
Customize Office 2007: http://pschmid.net/office2007/customize
RibbonCustomizer Add-In: http://ribboncustomizer.com
OneNote 2007: http://pschmid.net/office2007/onenote
***
Subscribe to my Office 2007 blog: http://pschmid.net/blog/feed

 

[FormerRacer]

Thank you Patrick for your reply. There was nothing going on either
immediately before or after the install. I restarted immediately at the
prompt inside the installer.

Although Office itself should not interfere with drivers, it appears that
the installer did do something that no other installer did.

Listen, anyone who lived through earlier OS's should be paranoid by now
about only installing under pristine conditions. This is what makes it all
the more maddening.

I have suspected for some time now that MS installers do something that
others don't that can affect the OS in a random fashion. When I am venting my
frustration, it is with the full knowledge that of ALL the myriad install
programs that I've ever used, whether it be 5 versions of Adobe products to
so many third-party programs I cannot possibly list them all, unless they
were a virus, they never crashed my OS as often as MS install has. I've even
had normal weekly updates crash two of my computers, but not at the same
time.

The only place to look when you think about this, is the installer. Perhaps
MS installers dig "deeper" than third party installers are allowed to go...
but there's a really bad random price to pay for that "closer to the metal"
type of install.

Any other thoughts? Thanks.

:

 

[Patrick Schmid [MVP]]

I can assure you that the Office installer didn't cause this problem and
that it doesn't dig deeper than any other installer. The Office setup is
based on the Windows Installer service that is used by most setup
programs nowadays. The Office setup program has exactly the same
abilities available as any other Windows setup program, and there are no
hidden things where it digs deeper or can do stuff others can't.
If you want to know exactly what it does, then download Orca
(http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370557.aspx) and open each
Office MSI file with it. The format takes quite some time to get used
to, but you can see right there what it does to the registry, what files
it installs, etc. For a more readable list of things it does, go on my
RTM/Issues Page linked below and find the manual removal steps for the
Office beta there. It gives you a list of folders and registry entries
that Office 2007 setup creates. If you were to remove all of them
manually, then Office 2007 would be untraceably removed from your
computer.
Sorry, but your belief that MS installers are special is just plain
wrong. I am pretty sure that the Office installer didn't cause your
problems.
My bet what happened?
- you had your computer running for days or weeks without a reboot when
you installed Office. Something you did in that time might have required
a reboot, which you didn't give it and that caused the problem.
- your hard drive has some problems that chkdsk probably can fix. When
you loaded roughly 1 GB on your hard drive, it wrote some piece of that
in a problem spot and that caused the whole mess
- your anti-virus software interfered with the Office setup and caused
the problem. AV programs are notorious for having potentially bad
side-effects with setup programs (MS recommendation is to actually turn
the AV program off for the duration of the Office setup)
- some other random thing. Did you, after it happened, hit the power
switch and tried to boot again? Or did you wipe the hard drive right
away?

Sorry, but Office is really not to blame here.

Patrick Schmid [OneNote MVP]
--------------
http://pschmid.net
***
Outlook 2007 Performance Update: http://pschmid.net/blog/2007/04/13/105
Office 2007 RTM Issues: http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/11/13/80
***
Customize Office 2007: http://pschmid.net/office2007/customize
RibbonCustomizer Add-In: http://ribboncustomizer.com
OneNote 2007: http://pschmid.net/office2007/onenote
***
Subscribe to my Office 2007 blog: http://pschmid.net/blog/feed

Thank you Patrick for your reply. There was nothing going on either
immediately before or after the install. I restarted immediately at the
prompt inside the installer.

Although Office itself should not interfere with drivers, it appears that
the installer did do something that no other installer did.

Listen, anyone who lived through earlier OS's should be paranoid by now
about only installing under pristine conditions. This is what makes it all
the more maddening.

I have suspected for some time now that MS installers do something that
others don't that can affect the OS in a random fashion. When I am venting my
frustration, it is with the full knowledge that of ALL the myriad install
programs that I've ever used, whether it be 5 versions of Adobe products to
so many third-party programs I cannot possibly list them all, unless they
were a virus, they never crashed my OS as often as MS install has. I've even
had normal weekly updates crash two of my computers, but not at the same
time.

The only place to look when you think about this, is the installer. Perhaps
MS installers dig "deeper" than third party installers are allowed to go...
but there's a really bad random price to pay for that "closer to the metal"
type of install.

Any other thoughts? Thanks.

:

It doesn't sound like Office would be the culprit. I know of only one
actual driver that Office installs, and that is the printer driver of
OneNote, which you apparently didn't install. At the stage though where
your computer hung, you are looking at something having gone wrong with
drivers.
Office doesn't interfere with drivers, so I'd say something else
happened. Did you install anything else besides Office before you
rebooted? How long did the computer run before that reboot?

Patrick Schmid [OneNote MVP]
--------------
http://pschmid.net
***
Outlook 2007 Performance Update: http://pschmid.net/blog/2007/04/13/105
Office 2007 RTM Issues: http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/11/13/80
***
Customize Office 2007: http://pschmid.net/office2007/customize
RibbonCustomizer Add-In: http://ribboncustomizer.com
OneNote 2007: http://pschmid.net/office2007/onenote
***
Subscribe to my Office 2007 blog: http://pschmid.net/blog/feed

 

[FormerRacer]

Thank you Patrick. This is actually very enlightening. It's possible that the
computer was not rebooted for several days before installation. The hard
drive issue is also completely plausible. I will do a chkdsk immediately and
see what crops up. Thanks for the link as well.

Maybe we're dealing with a statistical fluke here? Meaning, since MS does
the vast majority of installs on most machines, the chances are simply higher
that it grabs the machine "at a bad time".

Perhaps what this points to is a more intelligent install routine that
attempts to sniff out some of the issues you mentioned. You would think that
increasing the intelligence of install programs would be a natural
progression for MS. Fact is, this would be real progress in making the
installation of software by "grandma" more bulletproof. Perhaps I'm asking
too much.

 

[Patrick Schmid [MVP]]

Windows Installer is actually quite robust (much better than anything
that we had before). But, for example, look at the reboot that a lot of
setup programs require after they ran. I, for example, let only a few
programs actually have their reboots (mainly drivers, large programs
like Office, but hardly ever any smaller program/tool). Most of the
time, that doesn't create a problem because the writers of the setup
program might have gone overboard with requiring a reboot (there is one
setting that controls whether a windows installer package wants to
reboot or not. Often times, the creators of the setup program don't
actually check whether a reboot is required, but just set it for good
measures). That of course creates the potential that a program that
actually needs a reboot (e.g. a graphics driver), but doesn't get one
leaving the system in a somewhat unstable state that can be completely
destabilized by running another setup program...
You definitely see the effects of statistics here. Let's assume that the
Office setup program works without a problem (installing & uninstalling)
for 99.9% of all users. That means only 0.1% of all users experience
problems. With 400 million MS Office users (according to some stats it
might even be 500), that comes still out to 400,000 users having
problems. As it is impossible to write software that is 100% error free
(the space industry e.g. has a much more rigorous and expensive
development process than MS, yet we still see spectacular losses due to
software errors almost regularly), we will always have to deal with
these sorts of issues.

Patrick Schmid [OneNote MVP]
--------------
http://pschmid.net
***
Outlook 2007 Performance Update: http://pschmid.net/blog/2007/04/13/105
Office 2007 RTM Issues: http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/11/13/80
***
Customize Office 2007: http://pschmid.net/office2007/customize
RibbonCustomizer Add-In: http://ribboncustomizer.com
OneNote 2007: http://pschmid.net/office2007/onenote
***
Subscribe to my Office 2007 blog: http://pschmid.net/blog/feed